The Other Tales of Conan

by Howard, R. E.

  As he reached the wall, Conan dropped his buckler, took his sword in his teeth, sprang high in the air, and caught the lower sill of one of the cells in the third tier above the floor, a cell that had already discharged its occupant. With simian agility the Cimmerian mountaineer went up the wall, using the cell openings as hand and footholds. Once, as his face came opposite a cell opening, a hideous batlike visage looked into his as the bryluka started to emerge. Conan’s fist lashed out and struck the grinning face with a crunch of bone; then, without waiting to see what execution he had done, he swarmed on up.

  Below him, other brylukas climbed the wall in pursuit. Then with a heave and a grunt he was on the platform. Those guards who had been behind the ones who first started down the stair, seeing what was happening in the chamber, had turned and raced back through the tunnel. A few brylukas crowded into the tunnel in pursuit just as Conan reached the platform.

  Even as they turned toward him he was among them like a whirlwind. Bodies, whole or dismembered, spilled off the platform as his sword sheared through white, unnatural flesh. For an instant the platform was cleared of the gibbering horrors. Conan plunged into the tunnel and ran with all his might Ahead of him ran a few of the vampires, and ahead of them the guards who had been coming along the tunnel. Conan, coming to the brylukas from behind, struck down one, then another, then another, until they were all writhing in their blood behind him. He kept on until he came to the end of the tunnel, where the last of the guards had just ducked through the waterfall.

  A glance back showed Conan another swarm of brylukas rushing upon him with outstretched claws. Conan bolted through the sheet of water in his turn and found himself looking down upon the scene of the recent battle with the Turanians. The general and the rest of his escort were standing about, shouting and gesticulating as their fellows emerged from the water and ran down the ledge to the ground. When Conan appeared right after the last of these, the yammer continued without a break until a louder shout from the general cut through it:

  “It is one of the pirates! Shoot!”

  Conan, running down the ledge, was already halfway to the ladder shaft. Those in front of him, who had just reached the floor of the gorge, turned to stare as he raced past them with such tremendous strides that the archers, misjudging his speed, sent a flight of arrows clattering against the rocks behind him. Before they had nocked their second arrows, he had reached the vertical groove in the cliff face.

  The Cimmerian slipped into the shaft, whose concavity protected him momentarily from the arrows of the Turanians standing near the general. He caught at the indentations with hands and toes and went up like a monkey. By the time the Turanians had recovered their wits enough to run up the gorge to a position in front of the groove, where they could see him to shoot at, Conan was fifteen paces up and rising fast.

  Another storm of arrows whistled about him, clattering as they glanced from the rock. A couple struck his body but were prevented from piercing his flesh by his mail shirt. A couple of others struck his clothing and caught in the cloth. One hit his right arm, the point passing shallowly under the skin and then out again.

  With a fearful oath Conan tore the arrow out of the wound point-first, threw it from him, and continued his climb. Blood from the flesh wound soaked up his arm and down his body. By the next volley, he was so high that the arrows had little force left when they reached him. One struck his boot but failed to penetrate.

  Up and up he went, the Turanians becoming small beneath him. When their arrows no longer reached him, they ceased shooting. Snatches of argument floated up. The general wanted his men to climb the shaft after Conan, and the men protested that this would be futile, as he would simply wait at the top of the cliff and cut their heads off one by one as they emerged. Conan smiled grimly.

  Then he reached the top. He sat gasping on the edge with his feet hanging down into the shaft while he bandaged his wounds with strips torn from his clothing, meantime looking about him. Glancing ahead over the rock wall into the valley of the Akrim, he saw sheepskin-clad Hyrkanians riding hard for the hills, pursued by horsemen in glittering mail.Turanian soldiers. Below him, the Turanians and Zaporoskans milled around like ants and finally set off up the gorge to the castle, leaving a few of their number on watch in case Conan should come back down the groove.

  Some time later Conan rose, stretched his great muscles, and turned to look eastward toward the Sea of Vilayet. He started as his keen vision picked up a ship, and shading his eyes with his hand he made out a galley of the Turanian navy crawling away from the mouth of the creek where Artaban had left his ship.

  “Crom!” he muttered. “So the cowards piled aboard and pulled out without waiting!”

  He struck his palm with his fist, growling deep in his throat like an angry bear. Then he relaxed and laughed shortly. It was no more than he should have expected. Anyway, he was getting tired of the Hyrkanian lands, and there were still many countries in the West that he had never visited.

  He started to hunt for the precarious route down from the ridge that Vinashko had shown him.

  13. BLACK TEARS

  I. The Jaws of the Trap

  The noonday sun blazed down from the fiery dome of the sky. The harsh, dry sands of Shan-e-Sorkh, the Red Waste, baked in the pitiless blaze as in a giant oven. Naught moved in the still air; the few thorny shrubs that crowned the low, gravel-strewn hills, which rose in a wall at the edge of the Waste, stirred not.

  Neither did the soldiers who crouched behind them, watching the trail.

  Here some primeval conflict of natural forces had riven a cleft through the escarpment. Ages of erosion had widened this cleft, but it still formed a narrow pass between steep slopes a perfect site for an ambush.

  The troop of Turanian soldiery had lain hidden atop the hills all through the hot morning hours. Sweltering in their tunics of chain and scale mail, they crouched on sore hams and aching knees. Cursing under his breath, their captain, the Amir Boghra Khan, endured the long, uncomfortable vigil with them. His throat was as dry as sun-baked leather; within his mail, his body stewed. In this accursed land of death and blazing sun, a man could not even sweat comfortably; the desiccated desert air greedily drank up every drop of moisture, leaving one as dry as the withered tongue of a Stygian mummy.

  Now the amir blinked and rubbed his eyes, squinting against the glare to see again that tiny flash of light. A forward scout, concealed behind a dune of red sand, caught the sun in his mirror and flashed a signal toward his chief, hidden atop the hills.

  Now a cloud of dust could be seen. The portly, black-bearded Turanian nobleman grinned and forgot his discomfort. Surely his traitorous informant had truly earned the bribe it took to buy him!

  Soon, Boghra Khan could discern the long line of Zua-gir warriors, robed in flowing white khalats and mounted on slender desert steeds. As the band of desert marauders emerged from the cloud of dust raised by the hoofs of their horses, the Turanian lord could even make out the dark, lean, hawk-faced visages of his quarry, framed by their flowing headdresses so clear was the desert air and so bright the sun. Satisfaction seethed through his veins like red wine of Aghrapur from young King Yezdigerd’s private cellars.

  For years, now, this outlaw band had harried and looted towns and trading posts and caravan stations along the borders of Turan first under that blackhearted Zaporoskan rogue, Olgerd Vladislav; then, a little more than a year ago, by his successor, Conan. At last, Turanian spies in villages friendly to the outlaw band had found a corruptible member of that band, one Vardanes, not a Zuagir but a Zamorian. Vardanes had been a blood brother to Olgerd, whom Conan had overthrown, and was hungry for vengeance against the stranger who had usurped the chieftainship.

  Boghra thoughtfully tugged his beard. The Zamorian traitor was a smiling, laughing villain, dear to a Turanian heart. Small, lean, lithe, and swaggering, handsome and reckless as a young god, Vardanes was an amusing drinking companion and a devilish fighter but as cold-hearted and untrus
tworthy as an adder.

  Now the Zuagirs were passing through the defile. And there, at the head of the outriders, rode Vardanes on a prancing black mare. Boghra Khan raised a hand to warn his men to be ready. He wanted to let as many as possible of the Zuagirs enter the pass before closing the trap upon them. Only Vardanes was to be allowed through. The moment he was beyond the walls of sandstone, Boghra brought his hand down with a chopping motion.

  “Slay the dogs!” he thundered, rising.

  A hail of hissing arrows fell slanting through the sunlight like a deadly rain. In a second, the Zuagirs were a turmoil of shouting men and bucking horses. Flight after flight of arrows raked them. Men fell, clutching at feathered shafts, which sprouted as by magic from their bodies. Horses screamed as keen barbs gashed their dusty flanks.

  Dust rose in a choking cloud, veiling the pass below. So thick it became that Boghra Khan halted his archers for a moment, lest they waste their shafts in the murk. And that momentary twinge of thrift was his undoing. For out of the clamor rose one deep, bellowing voice, dominating the chaos.

  “Up the slopes and at them!”

  It was the voice of Conan. An instant later, the giant form of the Cimmerian himself came charging up the steep slope on a huge, fiery stallion. One might think that only a fool or a madman would charge straight up a steep slope of drifting sand and crumbling rock into the teeth of his foe, but Conan was neither. True, he was wild with ferocious lust for revenge, but behind his grim, dark face and smouldering eyes, like blue flames under scowling black brows, the sharp wit of a seasoned warrior was at work. He knew that often the only road through an ambush is the unexpected.

  Astonished, the Turanian warriors let bows slacken as they stared. Clawing and scrambling up the steep slopes of the sides of the pass, out of the dust-clouded floor of the defile, came a howling mob of frenzied Zuagirs, afoot and mounted, straight at them. In an instant the desert warriors more numerous than the amir had expected came roaring over the crest, scimitars flashing, cursing and shrieking bloodthirsty war cries.

  Before them all came the giant form of Conan. Arrows had ripped his white khalat, exposing the glittering black mail that clad his lion-thewed torso. His wild, unshorn mane streamed out from under his steel cap like a tattered banner, a chance shaft had torn away his flowing kaffia. On a wild-eyed stallion, he was upon them like some demon of myth. He was armed not with the tulwar of the desert folk but with a great, cross-hilted western broadsword his favorite among the many weapons of which he was master. In his scarred fist, this length of whirling, mirror-bright steel cut a scarlet path through the Turanians. It rose and fell, spraying scarlet droplets into the desert air. At every stroke it clove armor and flesh and bone, smashing in a skull here, lopping a limb there, hurling a third victim mangled and prone with ribs crushed in.

  By the end of a short, swift half-hour it was all over. No Turanians survived the onslaught save a few who had fled early and their leader. With his robe torn away and his face bloody, the limping and disheveled amir was led before Conan, who sat on his panting steed, wiping the gore from his steel with a dead man’s khalat.

  Conan fixed the wilted lordling with a scornful glance, not unmixed with sardonic humor.

  “So, Boghra, we meet again!” he growled.

  The amir blinked with disbelief. “You!” he gasped.

  Conan chuckled. A decade before, as a wandering young vagabond, the Cimmerian had served in the mercenaries of Turan. He had left King Yildiz’s standards rather hurriedly over a little matter of an officer’s mistress so hurriedly, in fact, that he had failed to settle a gambling wager with the same amir who stood astonished before him now. Then, as the merry young scion of a noble house, Boghra Khan and Conan had been comrades in many an escapade from gaming table to drinking shop and bawdy house. Now, years older, the same Boghra gaped up, crushed in battle by an old comrade whose name he had somehow never connected with that of the terrible leader of the desert tribesmen.

  Conan raked him with narrowing eyes. “You were awaiting us here, weren’t you?” he growled.

  The amir sagged. He did not wish to give information to the outlaw leader, even if they were old drinking companions. But he had heard too many grim tales of the Zuagirs’ bloody methods of wringing information from captives. Fat and soft from years of princely living, the Turanian officer feared he could not long keep silent under such pressure.

  Surprisingly, his cooperation was not needed. Conan had seen Vardanes, who had curiously requested the post of advance scout that morning, spur ahead through the further end of the pass just before the trap had been sprung.

  “How much did you pay Vardanes?” Conan demanded suddenly.

  “Two hundred silver shekels …” the Turanian mumbled. Then he broke off, astonished at his own indiscretion. Conan laughed.

  “A princely bribe, eh? That smiling rogue like every Zamorian, treacherous to the bottom of his rotten black heart! He’s never forgiven me for unseating Olgerd.” Conan broke off, leveling a quizzical glance at the bowed head of the amir. He grinned, not unkindly. “Nay, berate yourself not, Boghra. You did not betray your military secrets; I tricked you out of them. You can ride back to Aghrapur with your soldierly honor intact.”

  Boghra lifted his head with astonishment. “You will let me live?” he croaked.

  Conan nodded. “Why not? I still owe you a bag of gold from that old wager, so let me settle the debt this way. But next time, Boghra, have a care how you set traps for wolves. Sometimes you catch a tiger!”

  II. The Land of Ghosts

  Two days of hard riding through the red sands of Shan-e-Sorkh, and still the desert marauders had not caught up with the traitor. Thirsty for the sight of Vardanes’ blood, Conan pressed his men hard. The cruel code of the desert demanded the Death of Five Stakes for the roan who betrayed his comrades, and Conan was determined to see the Zamorian pay that price.

  On the evening of the second day, they made camp in the shelter of a hillock of parched sandstone, which thrust up from the rust-colored sands like the stump of some ruined ancient tower. Conan’s hard face, burnt almost black by the desert sun, was lined with fatigue. His stallion panted at the edge of exhaustion, slobbering through frothy lips as he set the water bag to the animal’s muzzle. Behind him, men stretched weary legs and aching arms. They watered the horses and lit a campfire to keep the wild desert dogs away. He heard the creak of ropes as saddlebags disgorged tents and cooking equipment.

  Sand crunched under a sandaled heel behind him. He turned to see the lined, bewhiskered face of one of his lieutenants. This was Gomer, a sloe-eyed, hook-nosed Shemite with greasy, blue-black ringlets escaping from the folds of his headdress.

  “Well?” growled Conan as he rubbed down the tired stallion with long, slow strokes of a stiff brush.

  The Shernite shrugged. “He’s still making a straight path to the southwest,” he said. “The blackhearted devil must be made of iron.”

  Conan laughed harshly. “His mare may be iron, but not Vardanes. He’s flesh and blood, as you shall see when we spread him out to the stakes and slit his guts for the vultures!”

  Comer’s sad eyes were haunted by a vague fear. “Conan, will you not give over this quest? Each day takes us deeper into this land of sun and sand, where only vipers and scorpions can live. By Dagon’s tail, unless we turn back, we shall leave our bones here to bleach forever!”

  “Not so,” grunted the Cimmerian. “If any bones are left to bleach here, they’ll be Zamorian. Don’t fret, Gomer; we’ll catch up to the traitor yet. Tomorrow, perhaps. He can’t keep up this pace forever.”

  “Nor can we!” Gomer protested. He paused, feeling Conan’s smoldering blue gaze searching his face.

  “But that’s not all that’s eating at your heart, is it?” demanded Conan. “Speak up, man. Out with it!”

  The burly Shemite shrugged eloquently. “Well, no. I the men feel ” His voice trailed away.

  “Speak, man or I’ll kick it out o
f you!”

  “This this is the Makan-e-Mordan!” Gomer burst out.

  “I know. I’ve heard of this ‘Place of Ghosts’ before. So what? Are you afraid of old crones’ fables?”

  Gomer looked unhappy. “They are not just fables, Conan. You are no Zuagir; you do not know this land and its terrors, as do we who have long dwelt in the wilderness. For thousands of years, this land has been a cursed and haunted place, and with every hour that we ride, we go deeper into this evil land. The men fear to tell you, but they are half mad with terror.”

  “With childish superstition, you mean,” snarled Conan. “I know they’ve been quaking in their boots over legends of ghosts and goblins. I’ve heard stories of this country, too, Gomer. But they are only tales to frighten babes, not warriors! Tell your comrades to beware. My wrath is stronger than all the ghosts that ever died!”

  “But, Conan!”

  Conan cut him off with a coarse word. “Enough of your childish night fears, Shemite! I have sworn by Crom and Mitra that I will have the blood of that Zamorian traitor or die trying! And if I have to scatter a little Zuagir blood along the way, I’ll not scruple to do so. Now cease yammering and come share a bottle with me. My throat’s as dry as this blasted desert, and all this talk dries it out the more.”

  Clapping Gomer on the shoulder, Conan strode away toward the campfire, where the men were unpacking stores of smoked meat, dried figs and dates, goat cheese, and leathern bottles of wine.

  But the Shemite did not rejoin the Cimmerian at once. He stood long, gazing after the swaggering chieftain he had followed for nearly two years, ever since they had found Conan crucified near the walls of Khauran. Conan had been a guard captain in the service of Queen Taramis of Khauran until her throne was usurped by the witch Salome, leagued with Constantius the Falcon, the Kothic voivode of the Free Companies.